Despite a glut of accessible information, consumers do not have a quick, easy, and manageable way to obtain and evaluate information about products or services. Satisfactory selection of a product or service frequently requires many hours of research. Users must absorb and sort thousands of available website links, lists, reviews and often redundant or repetitive textual descriptions.
For example, many consumers use the Internet to obtain and evaluate product or service information and to purchase products and services. Consumers seek to readily identify products and/or services that will satisfy the consumer's desires. Ideally, identification of a suitable product or service would be accomplished without repetitive searching; however the binary nature of Boolean search terms is often ill equipped to capture the nuance of a consumer's desire during an initial search, leading to repetitive searching. Additionally, web search engines require users to generate relevant textual search terms, ensure that they are spelled correctly (especially if it is a proper name or more obscure term), type or select those terms from a list, submit a search query and then scan, read and evaluate the best text-based results from a list often containing thousands of options. This process can require significant time investment without guaranteeing that a satisfactory result will be found because the consumer must themselves initially direct the search with an imperfect idea of how to properly, precisely classify desirable products or services.
In some industries, consumers often utilize guides who present choices to the consumer. These initial choices may be based on the consumer's tastes, location, and other relevant factors. An example of a guide is a travel agent who considers a client's vacation destination tastes, budget, and visceral responses to initial questions and criteria presented. The travel agent then applies their knowledge and experience to the consumer's interests and presents the consumer with one or more choices based on the travel agent's analysis of the consumer's interests. This guided selection of a vacation destination may go through several iterations of choices being presented to the consumer before a vacation destination is ultimately selected.